Quinn: It’s time for Silicon Valley firms to disclose the diversity of their workforce

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Google employees ride their Google multi-colored bicycles to and from the GooglePlex along Charleston Road in Mountain View, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Large and small, buildings are being collected in Mountain View by Google, which is on a shopping spree for parcels near — and sometimes not so near — its headquarters in Mountain View. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

Silicon Valley companies, big and small, should follow Google’s lead and disclose demographic information about their workforces.

Here’s why: Disclosure of the race, ethnicity and gender of a company’s workers is an act of goodwill to the community, a clear sign that the tech industry is ready to have a frank discussion about the issue, instead of deflecting the conversation to talking about their cool science and math K-12 initiatives.

This kind of disclosure matters now more than ever because the Bay Area is engaged in a wide-ranging conversation over who benefits from the tech industry’s success.

Not everyone can be an entrepreneur and create the next Facebook, or a venture capitalist picking and choosing the next winners. But most of us need a job and the Bay Area is tech’s town.

If companies are essentially a caste system, with roles dominated by people of a certain gender, race or age, that’s information a job seeker needs.

“When people are looking for the next opportunity, they want to know what the environment is like. Are there women in engineering, are there women in leadership?” said Marilyn Nagel, the former chief diversity officer at Cisco and now chief executive of Watermark, a nonprofit focused on increasing women in leadership roles.

Sure, the truth may be embarrassing and unpleasant. If the company’s workforce looks like Google’s, essentially a white male club, there will likely be negative stories and public pressure to change. On the eve of its public offering, Twitter had to endure slings and arrows over its all-male board before appointing a woman.

That Twitter discussion happened only because company executives and boards are already public information. But the ethnicity, race and gender of who works in tech, essentially the pipeline to those key leadership roles, has essentially been a black box. And that’s been on purpose.

Google and other companies fought a Mercury News request to disclose the information it gives the U.S. government annually. They fought again when CNN Money tried.

With its disclosure last week, Google acknowledged it had been wrong not to share the information.

“Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” wrote Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations in a blog post. “And it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.”

What kind of data am I talking about?

Companies should reveal annually their global, U.S. and Silicon Valley workforce by gender, race, ethnicity and age and by specific roles, such as leadership, tech, non-tech. They should reveal demographics when it comes to new hires, retention and promotion. All company information should be centrally located, easy to audit by an outside auditor so we can be sure of their veracity and that we are looking at the same categories. And it should be historical so that outsiders and insiders alike can see if the company is becoming more or less diverse over time.

If the diversity issue is tied to a company’s ability to innovate, as Google and others claim, shouldn’t shareholders of public companies put pressure on firms demanding more information and improved diversity?

David DeWalt, chief executive of FireEye, suggested that corporate governance firms like Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis could be the best avenue for pushing the issue.

“They could put a little bit more weight on those controls, a little bit would encourage it,” DeWalt said at an event this past week. He touted the diversity of his executive team and board. But FireEye’s 1,600 U.S. workers? DeWalt’s firm did not have its workforce demographics immediately available when I asked.

But his idea seems like a good one. Other groups are putting pressure on the companies as well. I plan to join them, knocking on company doors asking for the data.

Michelle Quinn is a former business columnist for the Bay Area News Group. Prior to that, she was the Silicon Valley correspondent at Politico covering tech policy and politics. She has also covered the tech industry at the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a blogger for the New York Times.

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